Minimum Wage Referendum Expected and Desired - UPDATE

San Diego's 10News is reporting that a campaign to repeal an expected rise in the minimum wage is being organized by the San Diego Small Business Coalition. (I urge you to "like" their Facebook page.)

San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer vetoed the measure, but the San Diego City Council is expected to override it. If that happens, Jason Roe, spokesman for the San Diego Small Business Coalition, says he has already begun to fundraise and has "substantial commitments from small businesses." 

Roe says the group is ready to launch a ballot drive to repeal the hike. Some 34,000 signatures must be gathered in a month to get it on the ballot in June 2016.

Meanwhile Council President Todd Gloria is already asking people not to sign the expected petition.  Pretty clear that the referendum fight is game on.  The petition is a great idea that I will support by getting signatures and making donations.

If the minimum wage hike stands, it is going to be a nightmare to have a different wage in San Diego than in neighboring communities.  Enforcement will be tough.  How will the City Attorney collect records from out of town businesses?  Further, such a measure erodes the competitive edge of San Diego businesses at the margins.  The minimum wage hike will only hurt the working poor and punish businesses.  All the energy expended on an issue that only helps a very small 2% of the workforce is all the proof I need that something foul is afoot.  Minimum wage hikes are a back door way for unions to get wage concessions without bothering to bargain or strike.  When some thug tries to stop me from gathering signatures on my petition, I guarantee that they will have been paid by a union.

UPDATE - From the U-T:

The San Diego City Council voted Monday to override Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s veto of gradual increases in the local minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by 2017, starting the clock on a referendum campaign that business leaders have said they’ll pursue.
If opponents can collect the 34,000 valid signatures required for a referendum by Sept. 17, the wage increases will be held in abeyance pending an election in June 2016.

What You Should Be Reading

• The supposed death of the Tea Party has been greatly exaggerated.  
• Meanwhile the left is pinning their hopes of defeating Carl DeMaio's challenge to Scott Peters by tying Carl to the Tea Party.  (I guess its not good enough to actually be LGBT to get support from that community, you have to be the right kind of LGBT.)  
• The VOSD fact checks claims and counter-claims in the Peters-DeMaio race regarding Peters' role in the pension scandal.  While they take DeMaio's claims to task, they also note that Peters' did not in fact solve the problem.  His involvement in the pension mess is surely a liability that no amount of left-leaning fact checking will wash away.  To be fair, I like a lot of the VOSD reporting, despite their clear bias.
•  Having a tough time blogging, research getting tough?  Consider hiring a virtual assistant (VA) for $5 per hour.  Wait, will the city attorney come looking for me if my VA is in India, but I benefit from the work?  (Seriously, I have considered this, as the research and editing is slowing down my writing.)

Wouldn't you rather be doing internet research for me?

Public domain image of 1903 Chicago "sweatshop" workers.

Todd Gloria Performs a Real Service

Democrat Todd Gloria is the acting mayor of San Diego and chair of the City Council budget committee.  He has performed a public service by providing a breakdown of the city budget deficit for 2015.  Bottom line, the budget has a deficit, but that deficit will be made worse by spending promises made by the city council over the past few years.  I like the Voice of San Diego headline: Gloria Reveals the Cost of Saying Yes.  The U-T reports that just maintaining the current level of services results in a projected deficit of $19 million next year.  Adding in promises made by the City Council would increase the deficit to $62 million and infrastructure repairs add another $16 million.  Gloria has done a service by clearly laying out the impact to the deficit of all the promises made by the city council in the past.

What should the city council do?  What do the mayoral candidates say? Here are some unfair and unbalanced synopses.

Fletcher:  Make hard choices, put public safety spending first. [Irony unintentional.]
Faulconer: Find money by increasing managed competition.
Alvarez: It's not that bad.
Aguirre: Are you kidding? That deficit is probably $200 million based on our needs.

I believe that we should look at savings in existing services.  Failing to review services that are no longer needed or are not needed as much is a known path to finding investment dollars in big businesses.  I also like managed competition, because even when the government employees win the bid, money is saved.  Although the focus of the newspaper articles is on the deficit, consider that the overall general fund budget is $1.2 billion.  That means that the projected deficit at existing levels is only between 1% and 2%.  It seems obvious that there is much more money available from cutting an existing program than from tinkering with the programs proposed.  There should be a rule that any new program has to be funded by cuts somewhere else in the budget.

The three top new big ticket items promised include more police, $14.3 million; infrastructure repairs, $11. 3 million, and more funding for the "arts," $5.5 million. My call, fund only the infrastructure repairs, because the streets are crappy and spending more on them now saves money later.

What services should be cut?  It turns out that Police and Fire make up just over half of the general fund expenditures.  Before we reflexively say that public safety is most important, we should ask if the level of police and fire protection is good enough. How do our crime and fire rates compare to similar cities?  Also, looking through the 2014 budget also reveals that $1.3 million in savings from managed competition for Fleet Services were removed from the budget, by Mayor Filner, I presume.  If managed competition is to save money, we have to stick to the "as bid" savings.

I would cut the library services, as I believe that libraries are an anachronism.  In the 2013 budget, the new central library added $2.4 million to city expenses over the $39 million already budgeted.  You could get a lot of street repairs done for that kind of money.  Nathan Fletcher says that budgeting is about making hard choices.  I'll believe him when he advocates a cut to library services.

Here is the proposed fiscal year 2014 General Fund employee breakdown. It is not the same as the budget breakdown, but serves as a good proxy.  Source sandiego.gov:

What You Should Be Reading

• Dean notes that the "fix is in" regarding the #ACA and correctly analyzes why the President's latest proposal will also fail.  Bonus for the left, the President continues to move the country into "rule by decree" lawlessness characteristic of say Venezuela.  KTCat analyzes why this is never going to work and Left Coast Rebel details the lawlessness.
• Detroit's bankruptcy is important because without the ability to discharge unsustainable pension obligations, other cities can't get reasonable negotiations with unions.  It is not a foregone conclusion that a federal judge will accept bankruptcy for Detroit. (Hat Tip: HotAir.)

DeMaio Out, Faulconer to Declare? San Diego Mayoral Race Roundup

Carl DeMaio announced today that he would not run for mayor of San Diego, and continue his election campaign in California's 52nd Congressional District.  Sdrostra's "live blog" and facebook page has been a good place to keep up with the news today.  Apparently, Ron Roberts will not run either, not that I even thought of him. Todd Gloria, current President of the City Council and acting Mayor, also announced he was not running via twitter.

STATEMENT | My focus is on cleaning up City Hall and working with San Diegans to move our City forward. -TG http://t.co/48eeEGUs3o
— Todd Gloria (@ToddGloria) September 3, 2013

Tony Krvaric, San Diego County Republican party chair, has all but endorsed Faulconer, saying "He represents the center right which is the tradition of mayors that we've had in the past,. . ."  David Alvarez, current city council member, and Democrat is also "mulling a run."  Fletcher may be in a tough spot if there is too much competition to his left.

My feeling is that this election will hinge on which candidates can turn out their voters in a low turn-out special election.  If there is only one well-known and credible Republican in the race; the two questions will be 1. Who takes second place? 2. Does Faulconer avoid a run off?  Avoiding a run off is very hard, with a 50% threshold needed.

I am very happy to see DeMaio stay in the CA-52 race.  I felt that the seat went over to the Democrats because the Republican party basically gave up on California, but the Democrats continued to push for votes here in 2012.

What You Should Be Reading

• Speaking of the GOP, Hispanics demographic rise will result in the death of the GOP is the conventional wisdom from the 2012 election.  In Texas, the GOP is making inroads.  Ralph Benko explains.
• Dean writes about the other civil rights struggle, that frankly is the most important one facing blacks today.
• KT at the Scratching Post has pointed to a number of articles that point to an impending financial meltdown in Japan.  Don't complain we didn't warn you.
• Anything that pops up about pension reform court cases.  If taxpayers can't shed municipal pension obligations, we are in big trouble.  No real news today.